Hope Springs Eternal
by Shire cat
Summary: Even though the time periods don't exactly mesh, what if Mort didn't die of his gunshot wound at the end of the book but was instead sent to Shawshank Prison? Will he learn absolution through Red and Andy?


A/N: I know the time periods don't work out right: Andy broke out in 1966 and everything involving "Secret window, secret garden" happened late 80s, early 90s but let's use our imaginations. This is fanfiction after all… I'm not Stephen King equals I don't own anything. Unlike Red, I ain't making no 20 percent, and this is for entertainment purposes only.

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Prologue: Tourniquet

"...and when they put you in that cell, when those bars slam home, that's when you know it's for real. Old life blown away in the blink of an eye...a long cold season in hell

stretching out ahead...nothing left but all the time in the world to think about it."

- Red, "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption", Steven King

Mort Rainey doesn't understand.

He, the man couldn't stand to watch while another boy at parochial school impaled a beetle with a pin, (even now he almost vomited remembering its squirms), had killed two people and his beloved cat, Bump(A/N: in the book it was a cat so I'm keeping it as that), and attempted his wife and her lover. He shivered at the memory of the screw driver in Bump's

_Bib _

chest. The hatchet in Tom Greenleaf's head. He had seen his own look of insane fury reflected in the rearview mirror as he brought the

_ax _

weapon upon the caretaker's skull. "Babe?" he had queried to Amy, confused. His wrestling of control from Shooter when he received the bullet in his leg.(A/N: If you don't remember/know/understand this episode, go get the book **Four past midnight** by Steven King, open it to "Secret window, Secret garden" and read your heart out.)

Shooter's knob… Kinter…Shooter…. Kinter….Shooter…Kinter. The names resonated in his skull, bouncing off the walls of his mind.

"I don't belong here!" shouted the man three persons to the font of Mort.

Does he? Mort wondered, Do any of us?

His guilt, so intense that it had burned a hole in his subconscious during his time of stress. The man who had never punished him when he deserved it he conjured into his punisher the second time he messed things up. And when would "Shooter" be back? When he least expected it? Who else could-would he kill? He remembered gripping the hat over his heart in a strange baptismal gesture. Do you accept John Shooter as your God and savior? To relinquish you from this pain? He grinned darkly at his own black humor only to somber up in a New York second. Did he drive Amy away? Was it his fits of sullenness? Or was it so deep that it was inexplicable? Was it something in his soul given to madness? Or was this the breaking point that all people-all those people with those dreadful afflictions called consciences- went through?

_Guilty, guilty guilty!_

The cold faces of the jury, the blood on his hands, Amy's terrified face; it seemed to flash before him in a blitzkrieg of images, declaring war on his psyche, splintering his brain with each lightning strike…. But Amy, something she had said to Ted (the insufferable prick) after the trial- that just for a moment she had seen Shooter too. Something about a letter…

_Guilty, guilty, guilty!_

One of the Sisters made kissy faces at him through the barred windows; he shuddered. Pushing his blond hair out of his face Mort looked up and saw other cons watching him. A chocolate-skinned black man with graying hair and beard was jotting things down on a cheap dime store notebook ; it looked as though he were taking bets. The man next to him, taller and reserved. Neat brown hair and ice blue eyes, wire rimmed glasses poked out of the breast pocket of his cheap robin's egg tinted prison work shirt. More the air of a bank manager than a felon, Mort would have written. If he still wrote, that is.

But he didn't still write and that wasn't his life anymore and there was no way he could deny it. He was a murderer and a lunatic and that's the way it was. Case closed.

"I don't belong here!"

'My thoughts exactly." mused Mort

"Alright ladies, welcome to Shawshank!"


End file.
